Apple working to hang on to iWork customers ahead of the rumored Office for iOS.

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Apple is stepping up its iWork game by publishing compatibility charts that show which Microsoft Office features are supported by the corresponding iWork apps for iOS. The charts accompanied an update to iWork for iOS on Tuesday, which the company described as a "major compatibility update" with desktop software like Office and iWork for the Mac. (iWork for Mac was also updated, largely to support the compatibility updates that came with iWork for iOS.)

Perhaps the most significant update that will interest regular Word users is that Pages can now perform Word-compatible "Track Changes." When you edit a Pages document on your iPad or iPhone, you can keep track of what's being edited and send it back to a Word user with (presumably) no major compatibility problems. The updated version of Pages can also accept or reject individual changes, or import Pages or Word documents with change tracking already in place. I know plenty of iOS-using writers, editors, and business users who are undoubtedly rejoicing at this, especially since there has yet to be an official release of Office for iOS.

Numbers and Keynote received a number of Office- and Mac iWork-compatible updates as well. Numbers for iOS can now hide/unhide rows and columns, lock/unlock objects, and preserve rich text in tables when importing or exporting files. (And don't forget the most important change: you can add reflections to objects—fancy.)

Keynote users will undoubtedly be thrilled with the added ability to import/export all PowerPoint and Mac Keynote slide sizes, in addition to the ability to import presentation themes (along with master slides). As anyone who has used Keynote to update a PowerPoint knows, few things are more painful than trying to reformat a poorly imported presentation.

Indeed, when it comes to compatibility with Office, this latest update to iWork for iOS generally aims to make life less painful. Although the long-rumored version of Office for iOS has yet to make a public appearance, Apple is undoubtedly making an effort to boost its compatibility options in hopes of keeping its iWork users around once Office does arrive for the mobile OS (which is expected next year).

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

63 Reader Comments

Apple may have a price advantage, but if editing MS Office documents is important to the user, few will want to put up with any compatibility problems. There is a huge opportunity for MS office on iOS, if it is done right.

I agree with the first commenter, huge opportunity still exists for MS Office.

I've been trying to decide on the most Office-compatible solution for my iPad, just to allow *some* real work on it, and it is a difficult comparison (Docs to Go, QuickOffice, Office2, etcetera) without buying them and using each one. Reviewers and app sales pitches don't tend to focus on the nitty-gritty of what formatting and features are either suspended or lost.

One example -- do any of these iOS word processors use/maintain MS Word's Styles and the document map that is enabled by using header styles? That's a life-saver for editing long multi-chapter documents.

Apple may have a price advantage, but if editing MS Office documents is important to the user, few will want to put up with any compatibility problems. There is a huge opportunity for MS office on iOS, if it is done right.

Edit: formatting

And with nary a whisper of FUD, you get the same result: why would a corporate type waste ANY energy / time dealing with incompatibilities to save $50? …$350?

OTOH, Office faces a huge risk of irrelevance: if tablet / phone apps work fine with just a couple quick 'n dirty apps, or maybe Keynote is sufficiently standalone for some people, compatibility shrinks to resemble the islands of WordPerfect in some legal and government environments. If I were running Microsoft*, I would release a $5 Lite suite with no pretensions of compatibility, a $50 one with somewhat limited features and a full-throated version at full price. Why not have that business?

This is the longest sustained run of a “Works” class office suite I've seen from Apple; a good sign, I guess.

Except that I gave up long ago on their changing formats, half-hearted support and planned obsolescence. The final straw was a couple years ago, trying to get my father-in-law's autobiography off his old machine given that I have no way to read his old floppies or SCSI drives, and it otherwise offered only a serial port.

Ended up being able to email it in raw text and import it into Word. For that, a genuine piece of amateur writing, I'd choose Pages?

Apple may have a price advantage, but if editing MS Office documents is important to the user, few will want to put up with any compatibility problems. There is a huge opportunity for MS office on iOS, if it is done right.

Edit: formatting

And with nary a whisper of FUD, you get the same result: why would a corporate type waste ANY energy / time dealing with incompatibilities to save $50? …$350?

OTOH, Office faces a huge risk of irrelevance: if tablet / phone apps work fine with just a couple quick 'n dirty apps, or maybe Keynote is sufficiently standalone for some people, compatibility shrinks to resemble the islands of WordPerfect in some legal and government environments. If I were running Microsoft*, I would release a $5 Lite suite with no pretensions of compatibility, a $50 one with somewhat limited features and a full-throated version at full price. Why not have that business?

* (Afterwards, I'd shoot myself.)

Although I'm not surprised that Microsoft is trying to protect their Windows/Office assets, the reality is that tablets are outpacing PCs at the moment. Microsoft is 5 years too late with Phone and is making a gallant try with a hail mary called Windows RT/Surface, but I suspect they're going to have to give in and release IOS and Android versions of Office soon or else face irrelevance. Google Docs and Apple iWork will have some users. Personally, I can work entirely in iWork for personal work, but the fear of compatibility causes me to avoid iWork and just use the real MS Office for work. Alas, this could open a pandora's box. If Microsoft's Office apps for tablets has the same compatibility questions that the other office products have, then they will dilute the value of their own products line. It has to come out rock solid or not come out at all.

Same goes for Nintendo.... they need to release the Mario franchise to IOS and Android and stop trying to build hardware. They are just too stubborn to do it.

Apple may have a price advantage, but if editing MS Office documents is important to the user, few will want to put up with any compatibility problems. There is a huge opportunity for MS office on iOS, if it is done right.

Edit: formatting

And with nary a whisper of FUD, you get the same result: why would a corporate type waste ANY energy / time dealing with incompatibilities to save $50? …$350?

OTOH, Office faces a huge risk of irrelevance: if tablet / phone apps work fine with just a couple quick 'n dirty apps, or maybe Keynote is sufficiently standalone for some people, compatibility shrinks to resemble the islands of WordPerfect in some legal and government environments. If I were running Microsoft*, I would release a $5 Lite suite with no pretensions of compatibility, a $50 one with somewhat limited features and a full-throated version at full price. Why not have that business?

* (Afterwards, I'd shoot myself.)

I live in a 3 product world: iWork (on iPad), Google Docs (mostly for Fusion Tables), and Office. Considering that all 3 products are paid for by my work* the issue for me with Office is not the price point; The issue is that Microsoft refuses to develop for Android, iOS, and to offer a real web client.

* I have a corporate Google Docs account, but use my personal one as Fusion Tables is not available on the corporate account.

Along with track changes, preserving comments is also pretty important here, with a team of co-authors communicating via these comments in an e-mailed file the standard way to collaborate. As far as I can see, comments are lost at the moment.

This dependency on having to be able to parse .doc files correctly makes me spend far too much time in the buggy, slow & expensive Word for Mac OS X that does not even support standard shortcuts like cmd-+, alt-left arrow, pinch to zoom (or indeed ^a/^e/^t).

This is fairly awesome so far. I have been using Pages for iOS since April and have had to limit my use to early drafts or miscellaneous pieces due to lack of good formatting compatibility with Word. It wouldn't be so bad except that all of my instructors use Word, and none of them forgive stupid formatting errors that always seem to happen when importing a document into Google Drive (Docs, whatever); documents created and edited in Word just don't seem to have as many issues with Google's solutions (unless you count headers, Google hates headers).

For those that wonder, some of my classes will allow me to use an iPad, or even my iPhone, to take notes or do work in class but do not want laptops used for whatever reason...

Apple may have a price advantage, but if editing MS Office documents is important to the user, few will want to put up with any compatibility problems. There is a huge opportunity for MS office on iOS, if it is done right.

Edit: formatting

That opportunity has been there since you could first run apps on iOS. I'm kinda surprised that the door has still been left open for Microsoft after this long.

This is a beautiful strategy by Apple. They should double down and shoot for three 9's of compatibility by the time Office is released for iOS in 2013.

Note that even on Microsoft's new Surface tablets, the experience is sub par. In Excel to edit a cell you have to tap the cell, then tap the "keyboard" button to bring up the on screen keyboard, then tap again to dismiss the keyboard when finished. So Office won't even be a first class tablet citizen on Microsoft hardware till 2013, in the same time frame Office for iOS will be released.

A related Microsoft mistake in the broader Office ecosystem is that the Outlook client for Mac cannot use Outlook.com. This seems to be a glaring misstep in the Office everywhere battle.

This is the longest sustained run of a “Works” class office suite I've seen from Apple; a good sign, I guess.

Except that I gave up long ago on their changing formats, half-hearted support and planned obsolescence. The final straw was a couple years ago, trying to get my father-in-law's autobiography off his old machine given that I have no way to read his old floppies or SCSI drives, and it otherwise offered only a serial port.

Ended up being able to email it in raw text and import it into Word. For that, a genuine piece of amateur writing, I'd choose Pages?

Sounds like you didn't have a problem with the file format. Sounds like you had a problem with not being able to read media. Can't really blame that one on Pages.

Some changes but no improvements for my use of Keynote. Formulas still can't be imported from Keynote for Mac. Unlike before, Keynote for iPad can now play two movies in parallel, but unfortunately this feature is useless because Keynote reliably crashes if you try to change slide before at least one of the two movies is finished. Compatibility issues between the Mac and iPad version of iWork will continue to prevent me from using iWork on iPad for serious work.

1- what about stylesheets ?2- what about outlines ?3- what about indexes, references...?

Plus, no headers and footers ? seriously ?

I'm using a stylesheet in all documents, and headers, footers, and outlines in pretty much all documents that aren't simple letters.

I don't know if the features are plain missing from Pages, or if it's just the import/export that doesn't handle them, but that's still unsatisfactory.

Agreed. At first I thought that we were finally going to get good compatibility between iWork and Office Apps. Unfortunately key compatibility elements are missing. Hopefully this is just a start and the key compatibility elements will be added in over time... I would not hold my breath, though!

If this update reduces some of the annoying danged format-incompatibility messages we always get upon opening Word docs in Pages, then I'll truly be pleased. (I'll keep our copies up to date, but we'd just as soon quit using LibreOffice.)

Note that even on Microsoft's new Surface tablets, the experience is sub par. In Excel to edit a cell you have to tap the cell, then tap the "keyboard" button to bring up the on screen keyboard, then tap again to dismiss the keyboard when finished.

How else would it work? Or are you pointing out that there is an extra step needed to invoke the keyboard?

(And I'd love to see statistics on Surface owners who manage to use them for Office apps without a physical keyboard of some sort. For many uses, it seems that the Surface really isn't a tablet at all - it's actually a fucked-up netbook that happens to have touch-screen capabilities.)

Keynote users will undoubtedly be thrilled with the added ability to import/export all PowerPoint and Mac Keynote slide sizes, in addition to the ability to import presentation themes (along with master slides). As anyone who has used Keynote to update a PowerPoint knows, few things are more painful than trying to reformat a poorly imported presentation.

Unless that is trying to make the PPT using Office for Mac in the first place, particularly if it contains illustrations made in Powerpoint.

I'd like MS to fix Powerpoint and trash the metafiles and photo bloat in the desktop version first, or maybe just kill it so we don't have to be slaves to this crappist of imaginable applications.

I would really tolerate not having to ever edit a Powerpoint native or in Keynote.

There's something fairly annoying about the iWork apps that I always mention to anyone buying an iDevice: Since *everyone* who has ever used a computer is used to a filesystem or at the very least something equivilent to a "My Documents" folder, getting accustomed to the fact that each app holds its own documents is just... tedious. No, it's not terrible by any means, but it is a step back for useability.

If they happen to have a Mac and then happen to own iWork already then I say they should get it for their iPad as well. However, that combination isn't too common as teachers are slightly more ignorant about such things and get scared when a compatibility error pops up when they open a kid's document (which happens everytime you use the default font in Pages as it doesn't exist by default on Windows/Office. To drive the point even further, there's no setting to change the default font in Pages. You have to make a new default template with whatever font selected, which is too much to ask for most basic users).

Those two things combined are enough for me to tell everyone to get any other office app for their device. With one (QuickOffice?) you instantly have all three features (doc, ppt, xls) built into one app. So when you want to view your documents you only have to look in one app and not three. If they use another (oncloud, cloudon?) they get Office for free with an Internet connection, and are required to use DropBox or another similar service which is extremely useful (iWork supports WebDav, which DropBox doesn't, so they aren't compatible).

While not huge factors, these problems are simply... unnecessary things to deal with in my opinion. Extra hassle in an already hassle-filled environment (college). For the record, I don't believe Office is a *better* application, but for the time being it is the defacto office suite. Then again, I personally don't think Apple is even trying to change that with what they do, and don't do, with iWork.

Over the years, I've pretty much relegated all of iWork to being great applications to use for yourself. Once you get into a mixed environment, or are using a PC in the class/office that is connected to the projector for your presentations, or sending documents to Office users, any benefit from iWork is gone. The pretty drop-shadows in Keynote are lost, the automatic word-wrapping around images in Pages are gone (while a feature in Word, isn't, or wasn't, a default action), and Numbers is pretty much a joke for any serious spreadsheet user (its iPad app, potentially until recently as I haven't used it in a year, couldn't even handle merged cells. Anything beyond simple formatting was completely butchered when converting from .xls/x). The very last thing, not being able to access iCloud documents with Windows is the nail in the coffin for me.

Apple might fix some of those issues with this update, and while I hope they do, I don't think I'll be rushing back to use iWork.

Yes, I mean there are extra steps in Excel for Surface in that you have to invoke, and dismiss, the keyboard to enter text into a cell. Of couse with spreadsheets on the iPad this is not necessary.

On Surface requiring a keyboard, that's really a function of whether you have to use non-Native apps. For example Office has the problem because it's not a Metro app. Same with a lot of the built in OS tools like file explorer.

The problem is that doing everything in Metro apps at this point is pretty difficult. Hence the whole paying developers to do Metro and MS working on a full native version of Metro Office.

dlux wrote:

WhitneyLand wrote:

Note that even on Microsoft's new Surface tablets, the experience is sub par. In Excel to edit a cell you have to tap the cell, then tap the "keyboard" button to bring up the on screen keyboard, then tap again to dismiss the keyboard when finished.

How else would it work? Or are you pointing out that there is an extra step needed to invoke the keyboard?

(And I'd love to see statistics on Surface owners who manage to use them for Office apps without a physical keyboard of some sort. For many uses, it seems that the Surface really isn't a tablet at all - it's actually a fucked-up netbook that happens to have touch-screen capabilities.)

These updates are awesome, but pages for iOS still needs some really major features for me to use it more.

1. It needs to be able to make documents in more varied paper sizes, and pleas for the love of dog, also be able to make horizontal documents.

2. Change tracking is seriously a great feature, but it should be paired with comments. Change tracking and comments are my top two used features in Word when I'm helping (making life impossible for) my students.

3. Ability to edit master styles, please!

4. Keyboard shortcuts, pretty please? Why put a CMD button on the keyboard if it's not gonna be usable!

--- I mean there's obviously many more features that the software needs to be great. It however still is ways above any piece of word processor available for iOS and Windows Phone. It's great value for the price... i just wish it was even better.